I am haunted today by the names of our dead. Every November, the Trans Murder Monitoring Project gathers whatever information they can about the transgender people that we have lost over the past year to horrific acts of violence. As I read them aloud, I fall into a Portuguese prosody — Domingues, Galisteu, Pereira — that is punctuated by a handful of angular North American surnames: Nettles, Morgan, Madden.

Any murder is grisly, but the murders of transgender people are usually particularly gruesome. Palmira Garcia of Las Marvales, Venezuela, was scalped. Camil from Brazil was burned with her partner in her own home. Dwayne Jones of Jamaica was beaten, stabbed, and shot. Evon Young of Milwaukee was tied up, suffocated, shot, set on fire, and thrown in the garbage. His body was never found.

The garbage. My throat catches at the word because it reminds me that transgender people of color are treated as the literal refuse of the world — the abject of humanity itself.